Christopher D. Schmitz's Blog, page 3

Targeting Relevant Audiences For Book Events

I use Bookfunnel and StoryOrigin to arrange group promotions. Because I get lots of applicants to my promos (and I always verify share/click stats from applicants) I get to look at a lot of data and metrics. Minutes ago I looked at one author who had a good swap history with good clicks on her promos, except every other month she had certain promos returning 0 clicks. 30-50 clicks on everything else, and then goose-eggs.

Her subscribers didn’t want to click on certain kinds of promos. Which ones? Each of those promos were advertised as “All Genre” or “multi-genre” bundles. I know I never join these kinds of promotions. The targeting is all wrong. Authors think they are going to tap into some major lists of whale readers by putting their Urban Fantasy or Science Fiction in bundles alongside Reverse Harem and Christian Bible Study books.

But zero clicks. 0. Nada. Nothing. And that result is common. Readers know what they like and what they are looking for. Not all “cross-pollination” is worth spending your time on.

There’s a deep marketing principle to be learned here: don’t expect to harvest turnips in a bean field. It sounds super Zen, right? (I just made that up… but it’s totally true.) Readers aren’t known for making great leaps across genre lines. They cross when it’s convenient, interesting, or by fractional degrees. They also dislike endless scrolling to see if there is something that they do like in a giant mix of things. Ask yourself this, if you want to eat M&Ms do you buy a bag of trail mix and then spend the next fifteen minutes sorting out all the M&Ms or would you rather just buy a damn bag of M&Ms? I know… very Zen of me. Readers feel the same way, and so do paperback buyers.

Today, we’re talking about relevance and targeting your audience properly and why it’s important to know your audience. If you can nail this, two things will happen. 1) You’ll meet the needs of your readers and better connect with them. 2) You’ll make that glorious cheddar.

 

One of the reasons that amazon ads are so successful for so many people is that it provides tools for authors who are marketing their books to zero in on a niche and drill down into it. The closer you can hit your niche (and therefore your strongest demographic for sales) the best performance your ad will have (which translates to better sales margins and profits.)

Selling more books at live events (hey! I’ve got a book by that title!) is always a tricky prospect. But it’s only guaranteed to fail if you don’t do your homework and show up to the wrong event. It would be insanely unwise to show up at a shoe seller’s convention and try to sell your brand of thriller novels next to the Reebok booth. The audience did not come for that, and only a small fraction will have the specific interest in reading, let alone in your genre, and even then it’ll be a tough sell since they didn’t likely come intending to spend time skimming paperbacks.

Likewise, if you attend a Christian Romance Literary event and try to sell your man on man spicy erotica books with covers so sizzling ab-a-licious that the nuns in the back are blushing you better believe you’re going to get Live, Love, Laughed right out of the building and are then forcibly baptized in essential oils.

“But it’s romance,” one might argue. “No. It’s smut,” that audience is likely to say. But likewise, the star book of the Christian Romance Literary event might not sell even a single copy at a Romance Writers Book Sale if it is more geared to the steamy side of things.

Regardless of the quality your product, you must also be keenly aware of your audience, its desires and expectations, and who the readers are as individuals. If you ignore it, any of those prerequisites, no amount of quality will let you reach the success you have envisioned. Your book must be relevant to the people you are showing it to.

Ironically, as I was writing this, I got an email from Mark Dawson (one of the Kings of Amazon Ads.) He writes about this same exact thing. He says about his earlier marketing approach on amazon: “I found it impossible to get clicks. I used a ‘scattergun’ approach: I would hoover up as many keywords as I could find and dump them into an ad with the hope that at least some of them would start to trigger and, hopefully, sell books… My initial forays were unsuccessful.”

Dawson notes he went back to Facebook ads because he was more familiar with it at that time. But with FB, “you need to take a potential reader from whatever it was they were doing and then deliver them to a store where they can then purchase the book that they’ve just seen. They almost certainly were not looking for a book when they saw the ad…” But with Amazon, “readers are actively looking for the kind of book that you’re advertising and all you need to do is show it to them.”

The online selling platform is different from a digital one, but there are a lot of principles that crossover, such as keeping your targeting relevant. Relevance, as far as live sales are concerned, is searching for as many of the “warm doors” as you can. It is easiest to sell books to people who love to read and prefer physical copies; being able to meet the author and get a paperback/hardcover autographed creates an added bonus by creating a meet & greet experience. But as cool as that is, people won’t care if it is not relevant to them. I would have zero inclination to read either of the example romance books. It doesn’t check any boxes for me, and so I wouldn’t likely stop and chat about anything book related. Even if some moment of curiosity did make me stop, there would be a zero percent chance of me buying.

The relevance factor is why you have to know your audience. Not just the market, but the people in it. I’ve wondered in the past about my ability to do a “cash grab” and write a romance book under a pen name. But I don’t think I would be successful. I simply don’t know the market, or the people of the market, well enough to accomplish this. Could I write a good romance book? I think I absolutely could, but it would hit the niche for things I like and would not necessarily hit the right mix of readers’ expectations… and I’d stand out like Eddie Murphy at a KKK rally if I tried to fake it at a Romance Lit Conference.

If you’re going to attend an event and set up a table/booth to sell your books at, here are some of the key things to bear in mind about relevance:

Genre expectationsCross over marketsLikely outcomes.Know the eventKnow who your audience is

Genre Expectations:

Having a good story is a must, regardless of genre. It should be edited and entertaining if its fiction or meet critical needs of your audience if it is nonfiction. But aside from those, which are matters of craft, there are some matters of form and function that are also expectations that vary by genre: everything from your cover design (even whether you use glossy or matte lamination) to trim size and the number of pages (here is a link to an article about expected word-count listed by genre). While indies are known for often coloring outside the lines, if you attempt to get too far outside of genre expectations, it will come back and cost you book sales.

Cross Over Markets:

If your book is a couple degrees outside of the expected genres, it might still do very well. Understand where there is crossover appeal. Sci-fi readers often also like fantasy. I sell a lot of both when I do targeted events. This does not always work in the online world, however. Craig Martelle (founder of the 20booksto50k group) is well known as a military SF author. When he rolled out his sword and sorcery novel, Black Heart of the Dragon God, it did not perform as he’d hoped with his digital readership—his military SF readers would not cross over that far from genre distinctions. But at live events? He sold out of it at his Alaska comic-con appearance.

Regarding crossover markets, Craig notes: “those people [at comic-con]are the target audience… but it’s different from my main audience, which is into both sci-fi and thrillers. I get more crossover there, a lot more crossover. Just understand the demographics of your readership.” He suggests the wisdom of conducting a poll of your readership, something that is easily done through your newsletter subscribers. He also notes that he could absolutely sell more books like that online, but not without building a new reader base, something that would mean rebuilding/starting from the ground up.

Outcomes:

You should have an idea of what your likely sales outcomes are based on the show. In Sell More Books at Live Events, I break down live events based on size and what kind of numbers and expectations I can build around the attendance expectations. If I market well, have a good booth appearance, and if the show is well run, I know with a pretty good accuracy rating how many books I will sell compared to the number of event visitors.

A little research goes a long way. I have looked into different events that looked like great opportunities and then bypassed them, seeing red flags that steer me away. Some look better than they are and some I know would simply not translate as sales. Some are the equivalent to the introductory story (all-genre book sales.)

Know the Event

You want to estimate how many you can reasonably sell so that you can best prepare for the event. Key is knowing the expected attendance, kind of event, genres that attendees might read, and knowing if attendees are geared toward spending money or simply taking in the events experiences. The best metric is to have visited the event before, or pick the brain of a previous vendor or guest. You can also make some helpful assumptions with a little online research and asking questions to the event organizers.

This is tied closely to the event outcomes point mentioned above and is the gray area bleeding into the next field, knowing your audience. All the data and metrics in the world won’t help you if you don’t understand who the people are that you’re trying to sell books to.

Know your Audience: The RPG Method

I was at a book marketing meet-up several years back when I heard another author suggest we look at our market as a single, ideal person. Distill your readership into a person, create a dossier for him or her. More than their likes and dislikes, though what is their marital status, how many kids do they have, do they rent or own, urban or rural?

The exercise is great because in thinking through those details, you are asking for character information, a fleshed out and usable backstory, as if that character could be written into a fiction world. For me, this seems easiest to do as a Character Sheet from a role-playing game.

Don’t just make a type of person. Create an actual person. Imagine your ideal reader and tell us about him or her. You can feel free to be even more descriptive than what you see here:

A blank version if this character form is available as a free download in my “Author Services” tab on my website.

Feel free to make your characters even more detailed. You may find that you enjoy the process, and in doing so, you’ll begin to understand your potential book buyers all the more for it. The more niched your books are, and the more you lean into a specific genre, the more relevant creating these fictitious readers will be for you.

The trick is not in creating hypothetical characters. There is no special magic in doing that. It would be like writing up a hundred character sheets for your favorite role playing game, but then never playing them. The exercise is pointless if you never meet the characters… if you never play the game.

What this exercise does do, however, is allow you to understand your buyers more by having hypothetical interactions with them. It builds mental pathways to understanding them by degrees. Come up with widely varied personas who might be potential customers, but put them as far ideologically as can be, and then look for the things that tie them together. In those areas of similarity is the world you should exist within when you are selling that book. Build three characters—make one a Trump supporter, make one an anti-Trumper, and make a third who votes only third party… all three would love to buy your book… now look at what they have in common and why all three of those might be at the particular event you are selling books at. If you can find the areas where their personal lives intersect and live inside the network of commonality, you’ll be able to sell books like no one else.

For a limited time, get a free downloaded copy of Sell More Books at Live Events with no strings attached. (This deal ends mid-September). 

Sell More Books at Live Events is available for sale by clicking here. It’s available at all the major outlets.

How do I set up preorders for paperbacks?

If you’re new to the writing scene (or even relatively new) you may have seen indie authors with books set up for pre-order purchase and for both ebook and paperback. For authors who use KDPprint (Amazon’s publishing service) this seems like a mystery. (If you need an example, here is an amazon link to my upcoming Oct 2022 release, Sell More Books at Live Events.)

How does an author do that? KDPprint does not allow a paperback to collect presales, only ebook versions. There are reasons why which we could spend time speculating on, but that would be a waste. The big question is: how can an indie set that up?

Quite some time back on my blog, and also in my book The Indie Author’s Bible, I advocated for a publishing model that does not rely exclusively on KDPprint for publishing needs. Here’s a link to that article. But to sum it up, you get better treatment for your book at certain stores and distribution models if you also publish through IngramSpark.

The ability to presale your paperbacks is another reason to do that. The ebook version can even be exclusive to Amazon/KU and this will not affect the ability to do this. Ebook and print book models are completely different and unaffected by each other.

The way to set up presales is to create your book in Ingramspark and set your publication date for the future release after you have already set up your ebook prerelease in your KDP dashboard. Your Ingramspark version will need an ISBN that you purchased and own (through Bowker in the US.) Using a free ISBN through Ingramspark is not likely to work well with setting this up for prerelease on Amazon’s systems.

You have to complete the publication process through Ingramspark in order to have your prerelease go live. That means you have to have a manuscript uploaded and there may be a fee unless you have a membership at partnering organizations such as the Alliance of Independent Authors (ALLi). If you are sure your book is ready, there are many places you can get a free publishing code to waive the setup fee, but there will be a fee to make any edits/revisions. (I often find the need to make tweaks, and so I joined ALLi for this reason since members get free revisions, click to check it out.)

If your pre-order ebook does not automatically add the paperback option for preorders (which would be routed through Ingramspark,) you may need to begin setting up a paperback version in your KDP dashboard, but do not click to publish! Using your ISBN which we also used in the above step to create the book at Ingramspark ought to be enough to make the Amazon system recognize that these are the same book, though it will not sell them through your KDP sales dashboard and they will go through Ingramspark’s instead since the book is not completed and published by KDPprint. (You should complete the publishing process at KDP once the release date has arrived for the paperback to maximize your income on sales through the amazon systems; Amazon will put the KDPprint version in the primary position to sell once you do and you will make more money off that version since it will have a lower print cost and a slightly higher royalty rate in-house).

If the Amazon system still does not link your physical preorder to the amazon listing, contact KDP’s customer support through your KDP dashboard and ask them to link the items.

That’s it! If you’re already using both systems, it’s super easy and only requires a few extra steps to be taken, and earlier than you might otherwise, in order to get the pre-order live.

Want to sell more books at live events? Free resource for a limited time!

Early May… at a mid-Iowa Renaissance Festival.
It always rains at renfest. At least for a few minutes. A quick shower gave me a moment to sort out the larger bills from the smaller ones. It was only the first day, but I was doing pretty well. Enough that a random kilted man sees my cash and says to his buddy in the pirate outfit, “Dang, man. I’m in the wrong business. I’ve gotta write me a book.”

Here’s the thing about me, but I’m good at live sales… like the face to face kind… I’m always trying to improve my online sales systems, but I excel at live shows. I travel to sell my books at multiple events per year. Let me tell you about it…

Fast Forward to May 21…
It’s 2 weeks after renfest and I just sold $1,500 worth of books in one 7-hour day at a convention; it’s a good show, but still far from my best ever. I’m on pace to do about $7k in face to face sales for the month (see my screenshot,) which is about 600 paperback and hardcover books. I’m not trying to brag, rather to demonstrate that I’m good at this part of the author business.

The cool part is that this is something a person can learn. I teach other authors how to perform better and sell more at face-to-face engagements. For many it’s an easier path than trying to figure out CPC ads and data scrapers.

Not everybody can sell well in person. Some people can’t seem to wrap their noodle around digital marketing. We’ve all got different skillsets.

For me, digital sales are my worst–but I’m great at selling paperbacks to people. I’ve taken probably every online course in the past from many digital marketers and lately I’ve been helping indies sell more books at live events (conventions, vendor fairs, etc.) and I’m giving my system away for the next couple weeks!

I will be releasing Sell More Books at Live Events in late 2022. I’ll be offering free copies for review and looking for ARC feedback (and reviews at launch). I teach exactly what I do to sell thousands of paperback books per year (I’m on course this month to break $7k in sales, or about 600 books).

Click here to get the book in advance! You will not be placed on my newsletter or signed up for anything. This is an offer on the new nonfiction only. You will not be advertised to or have your info passed on.

I’ll be offering a full course, soon. Until then, you can also join this Facebook group to connect with others and get advice on how to improve your live sales.

The book is currently available for preorder from all major outlets at https://books2read.com/sellmorebooks

How POD books are created

Seeing how the sausages are made is not always a fun experience… but that analogy isn’t true of the Print on Demand book industry. Some of the folks at an Illinois KDP Print warehouse did a virtual tour and explain the process of how a book is made walking you through what happens once a customer clicks Buy. Watch the video:

Color Printing and the Cost impact of Children’s books

I recently had a reader email me questions about printing color in books.  Their question/complaint was along the lines of “Is having color in my book an industry no-no? Are interior color images useless in a +500 page book? I don’t understand this book selling industry and the absolutely crazy costs of this type of publishing!!!”

The frustration is understandable—especially since there are some things a person might want to try, such as including a few color images inside the book. This might especially be true if you are writing nonfiction and have a handful of images you might wish to include—something common in travelogues and other types of books…

This color issue was one of my first hard-learned lessons of my career. In my first fantasy series I wrote I wanted to have one character’s dialogue be a different color to represent the wrongness of his words whenever he spoke. The character was a demon, and later in the series an angelic creature would fall and become a demon; his words would change color to reinforce that fact. It was clever. More clever than the industry was set up for. Well, almost. You can do pretty much anything you want in the print industry—you just have to pay for it.

The Print on Demand machines which are the standard operations set up for indie authors are set up to print in either black or full color. Doing something unique and special would require using a machine that is set up specific to the book, which means a print run of several thousand copies and defeats some of the idea of being independent and simply running off copies as needed (POD). What I learned is that you have to decide exactly how important to the final product is your color? Is it critical to the story? Ask yourself if there is a workaround? I opted to use a font change instead of a color change for reasons discussed below.

A cool effect like a page written in a certain color, a sprinkling of graphics, or certain dialogue tags seem like it’s not a big deal, but to the machine it is everything. The manuscript is either color or it is not. If you have a 500 page book with one full color image in the middle, that’s a 500 page color print job. Page one? It’s color. The last page? Still color. Printing a graphic novel in B&W? That’s a B&W print, but add Red so you have only black and red ink like some of Frank Miller’s stuff, now it’s full color. The rule is: any color=a full color manuscript.

True, this might hamper your artistic expression, but business decisions often do. Your book is also a business and so you’ll have to make decisions about profit margins, etc. For my fantasy series, I had to make the decision to work around the color because of the math and the fact that I sell a ton of paperbacks. I would sell a lot less if my book prices were triple what they are now (and they would be way out of market norms, further reducing sales).

Here’s the math on a 500 page book. At Amazon’s KDP Print prices (a popular POD service) you should retail at about 17.99 for a B&W print book. That makes a razor thin profit margin for buyers in expanded distribution (let’s say your mom buys a book at Barnes and Nobles or at the local Indie Store and they order it in… you’ll make only 35cents on that sale.) If it’s bought at Amazon you’ll make $3.95, and if you sell the book yourself you’ll net about eleven bucks. That paperback will cost you $6.85 to print, so about $70 for a box of ten copies that you’ll want to keep on hand to sell to all those folks at your family reunion using a good old fashioned guilt trip.

Now let’s imagine you absolutely have to have three pages with color in that book because you think the readers need to see the full color illustrations your child did of the main characters in 48 color Crayola. That’s a choice you can make, but it will change the pricing scheme.

The print cost on a 500 page color print job is 35.85. Good news, you will make about $18 when(if) the book sells on amazon. Bad news, it has to be priced at $89.99 just so that you can make fifteen cents if someone orders it your mom and pop bookstore. That box of ten is now $360. Not even a guilt trip is going to move more than one or two copies of that book. Frankly, the book becomes impossible to sell.

That’s crazy and frustrating, right? Think back to the original question that was posed… I imagine some folks wonder why the option exists at all. Children’s books.

Let’s say you have a 28 page children’s book with full color illustrations. You could sell it for $16.99 and it will cost $3.65 to print at KDP Print. The indie bookstore will net you $3.15 and sales from Zon will earn you $6.09. That’s decent margins. You could even reduce the price for sales and still do okay… Selling a copy at your church bake sale will make you about thirteen bucks.

There’s a reason full color children’s books are often in the $15-$20 range.

The above numbers are for a paperback, however. If you wanted to get some in a nice case laminate binding, you’d have to go to Ingramspark, (KDP Print currently has a minimum page count of 75 pages for color books.) Same book with hard cover and cheapest options will cost $7.57 to print and earn you $2.82 via online sales if the price remains at $16.99. The bake sale buyers will still earn you around nine dollars.

Help me avoid homelessness!

 

Hey everyone! I’m not quite homeless, but if I was a hobo would you give me $1? Would you buy 17 books from me for $0.99? What if some of the books in that fat stack of fiction were by a few bestsellers? 

Check out this huge book bundle I’m in and buy a copy of 17 books for just .99. It will seriously help prevent me from becoming homeless! Plus you’ll get like $150 worth of books for one fifteenth of the cost of the last coffee I bought at Starbucks… just click the graphic!

Answering Reader Questions #2

I often get author/user questions in my email. I thought I’d write a longer post here since it’s been a little while since I blogged.

I want my rights protected. Would it be safer to go with a mom and pop print shop or to work with a friend that has the same know-how and equipment in their basement? 

How do you plan on people purchasing and receiving your books. Either the mom/pop or basement approach leaves you with the question of distribution and delivery side of things as well as the sales hub channels. You certainly COULD go small (Its a model called micropress, actually) but you should also get your book set up to be produced, marketed by, sold by, and shipped by the big players. Ingram is where bookstores go to purchase their books for resale and libraries often go there as well. Ingram is basically a professional middleman. Amazon is the same, except that customers (lotsof customers) got here too. more than 60% of all books sold in the USA come through Amazon. In my book and blog I recommend doing both Amazon and using Ingramspark, which will provide the same service, but there are reasons I recommend doing both, each one relating to its target market. Mom and Pop print shops typically can’t match the price of their services for author copies. If they couldthen it would be worth using them to print copies that you would sell personally, but it’s only really worth it if you’re going to be selling hundreds of copies per year and if the savings are going to be at least 0.75 per book.

 

I promise, I’m coming to your rights questions… I’m making an assumption that this is your first book (or your first serious attempt at getting books printed and making a run at being an author.) Author is a business title, so you’ll want to think of it like a business. Even collecting sales tax, etc. which means tracking sales and paperwork for taxes, etc. It sounds daunting, but there are lots of great tools to help… but having less to track as you get on your feet is very helpful, and it’s why the savings should be significant per copy if you are going to get a bunch from a local printer… how many should you get? The answer to that is how many do you think you can move… it’s an answer that requires a gut check and guidance (I’ve published more than 30 novels, and honestly, I think I’ve sold less than 20 copies of my books in total to family. Maybe again as many to friends, and that’s over the last 15 years.) It’s maybe more than an email, but I often take authors to my live sales events and teach them how to sell and get familiar with the tools that I use so that they can learn what I’m doing and use it for themselves. LMK if you’re interested.

 

On to rights. My advice is to not worry much about it. All books are protected by copyright the minute they are completed. Thieves and criminals don’t care about rights or laws and rules. By their nature they will violate rules. Your rights won’t stop them. that may sound disheartening, but accepting it will give you the freedom to continue creating anyway, despite them. The thing about your rights is that to enforce them, you’ve got to know where someone is violating them… just like owning a trademark: it is the trademark owner’s duty to enforce it. If you spend all your time worrying that someone is ripping you off, you won’t be spending time working on a new book, or marketing and selling an existing one. And places like Amazon and others have built-in tools that help you enforce your rights… Amazon pretty much assumes authors are guilty of infringing on IP right out of the gate. I got sued by the lawyers for E.L. James (of Fifty Shades of Gray) early this year… well, they threatened to sue me and filed a complaint on Amazon (a process that is easier than ordering tacos at a fast food self-serve kiosk). The trademark lawyers saw “50 Shades” and “Fifty Shades” (not the same) and assumed I was a scammer, despite my comedy being so far different that you could never confuse them, they simply looked for books to hit with a C&D to validate their existence and collect their lawyer fees. Not only did those 2 books in my comedy series get booted from amazon (my bestsellers, actually) but my entire account got banned and I was blacklisted (a seriously bad thing for any legit author). After about 2 1/2 weeks everything was restored after I explained how vastly different my book was to the lawyers and they rescinded their complaint. There are other stories of Indie authors who have hit #1 on the charts and a copycat author is coming in with something similar that would be “great for the fans of XYZ Author” and then file infringement complaints on amazon to temporarily remove their strongest competitor whose fans they want to market to. This kind of maliciously false infringement claim has been a problem in the past, but Amazon is getting better at it (for the better known authors, anyway). Regardless, Zon reacts almost too strongly to complaints, IMO and I have ideas I think are better, but Bezos doesn’t care about my opinion. There is also the case of Gravity (the Sandra Bullock movie) which was blatantly ripped off from the author who received nothing for it. Despite all the protection and proof in the world, it’s still possible to have your work legally stolen right in front of your eyes.

 

There’s one more issue to think of: you’ve got to do pretty well with your sales and really be hitting on all cylinders in order to have people bother stealing your work or infringing on your rights. I’m of the persuasion that it’s best to keep creating. Scammers gonna scam, but creators are gonna create. Just don’t let fear of someone ripping you off rob your joy of making your art or prevent you from doing your craft. Get big enough so that you’ve got your own lawyers searching for criminals so you can keep writing.

 

I have worked with the Library of Congress before on a music project. (I have not looked into the particulars for a book yet.) My thought was (given that they require the best sample of my work) to have a copy of the book printed, send it to the LOC in the mail and await registration. Is it that simple or is there more to it? 

Yes, it’s pretty much that simple. There is also a fee and there are lots of guides online. I honestly don’t other with LOC. It doesprovide you with a sample for the strongest possible reaction to defend your rights, but there are enough other methods and protections that it  doesn’t seem worth it to me. I honestly feel it’s like buying an extended warranty for your new toaster. Not usually worth it, but there are a few times you might consider it. It doeshelp expedite things in defending a maliciously false infringement claim like I mentioned about.

 

The mom and pop printing shop told me to get a barcode for the book (as it would be more cost effective for me). How can I acquire one? 

You WILL need a barcode. Most of the bigger places will automatically generate the barcode for you. Ingramspark and Amazon’s print services (KDP Print) will do that automatically. You just need to input the ISBN which all books are legally mandated to have (another government conspiracy, IMO.) There are applications you can purchase which will create them, or you can pay someone on fiverr a few bucks to make one for you. When you purchase an ISBN, your ISBN broker will usually be able to provide a barcode for a few extra bucks. The cheapest way to do it is probably fiverr, unless you’re buying the ISBN and they have a cheap ($15 or under) option to get the barcode generated. Check out Fiverr.

 

I know that I will need an ISBN number as well. (It’s been a long time since I worked with the Library of Congress.) Are they usually provided with the copyright registration or do I need a separate application? 

The best way to pick up an ISBN is from Bowker. All ISBNs come from Bowker in the USA. Remember what I said about a conspiracy? Not to go all Dale Gribble, but the government forces anyone publishing books to purchase a product they exclusively control. It’s worth a letter to your congressperson. ISBNs are separate from LOC registration and you need the ISBN in order to LOC (and have it on the book you send them for an example.) Bowker’s sales page for ISBNs is at https://myidentifiers.com/ and 1 ISBN will cost you $125. You need different ISBNs for different versions of the book (you can change and edit mistakes out of future editions without new ISBNs, but changing trim size or format [paperback to hardcover or ebook] will each require a new ISBN.)

 

Hopefully the info helps. You might also check out TreeShaker books… might be able to shortcut some of the publishing things for you.

We’re at https://authorchristopherd.wixsite.com/treeshakerbooks 

Start a scary-good new series.My Post-Apocalyptic SF/Horr...

Start a scary-good new series.

My Post-Apocalyptic SF/Horror has just released and it’s just 99c through Halloween. This story is my baby. Please pick up a copy and tell the world!

Dr. Swaggart must race against time, failing lights, and a leaky oxygen tank to save his new family: the last remnant of mankind who dwells in the underground bunker Ark 1. If he fails, the monster infecting his friends will finally succeed in destroying humanity once and for all!

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B09DWJZKS7

NaNoWriMo: Special Tool Set

Nanowrimo is coming up. It’s okay if you’re not participating, but if you’re an author (at any stage–maybe you’re just dabbling or considering your first story) this bundle of tools might be an amazing find for you. you can get the full load of books from folks who know a few things about the Indie world. You can pick up all the books for just $20 or 4 of them for $5.

I can tell you that I bought some of these books for full price and have used them in my own writing career. You’ll find books by Kevin J Anderson (Dune, Star Wars,) Craig Martelle (20booksto50k,) Joanna Penn (The Creative Penn,) and yours truly!

It also includes a massive discount on Jutoh3 if you’re looking to get away from standard word processors (I use Scrivener which this Jutoh has been compared to).

Get the whole thing for a limited time (through November) over at https://storybundle.com/nano

How to not look like a hack on StoryOrigin

I use StoryOrigin a lot. For a while, I used both SO and BookFunnel, but I found I preferred SO for a variety of reasons. It used to be free, and I was actually happy when it went to a paid service because even a very low cost of entry helps weed out the no talent hacks. Yes. I said it. (There are a great many folks who will load up newsletter swaps—as many as 70 of them per NL Swap—with really bad DIY covers and questionable content.)

Authors who use newsletter services like StoryOrigin, BookFunnel, Prolficworks, etc. are very familiar with “Freebie seekers.” They eventually get purged from our NewsLetter Lists… likewise with unscrupulous swappers who steal access to your list or repeatedly beg to swap their garbage books that they’ve invested $0 into in hopes that you’ll prominently feature that terrible cover to their audience even though your $600 pro cover (and $400 edit) will be at the bottom of a 30 book catalogue email on a NL list with a 2% open rate out of 212 subs (and one of those recorded opens was the author just testing the link).

You can see I have an ax to grind with NL swap partners who act like hacks. Even though SO is a paid service, it is still free, but with limited features, just like bookfunnel is. I could talk about why I think SO is superior, but I’ll leave that for another time.

However, I’ve run across a great many folks with great covers for books that have decent reviews and they still look like hacks. It’s not their fault (actually it is) but they might have never wrapped their head around how the process works—that ignorance leads them to miss out on swaps and inclusion with group promos so I thought I’d write a hand guide. Ignorance is easily cured so long as a person wishes it so. Sidenote: you may have gotten this link emailed directly to you if you tried to swap with me on SO or enter one of my group promos. Please pay attention to this article’s contents as the things discussed in it are the norm for both SO & BookFunnel. If I sent this to you, take it as an indication that potential swaps may happen further down the line so long as you start using the system correctly.

Without further ado, let’s discuss How not to look like a hack on StoryOrigin.

I get requests to swap pretty regularly from new users who see my swap opportunities. I have them regularly available through SO where they are scheduled to coincide with my Newsletters. Because I send on a preset schedule I can arrange a recurring opening and do some long-term planning that way.

Here’s a quick breakdown covering common reasons you are ignored:

you are requesting a swap on that same day
(I have my emails written and scheduled to auto-send a few days in advance and they are sent at 6am on the release date… panic requests over the lunch hour for a swap on the same day are always ignored. The email was already sent hours ago)You have no data to showYou have all the wrong data (months’ worth of send data that reveals you are stuffing your NL with multiple shares or not sending)

 

This article will help you get your NL numbers up.

Read more about NL Stuffing, Sendsluts, and how to build your list by clicking here.

 

Hopefully the above helps you. I cannot stress how important the above article is. If you pay attention to the rest of this article but ignore the stuff in the above link, you’re still going to look like a hack. Worse. You’ll like someone who is bad at this on purpose because you’ll do everything else correctly, but still wallow in what now looks like intentional jack-assery. (Sidenote, that is the name of the email folder where I keep past communications from folks on my internal black list so I don’t accidently swap with them in the future. All authors who take this seriously have a list of folks they’ll never work with again. Don’t make that list. Read the dang article.)

 

From here on out I’ll assume that you’ve read the above article. Hypothetically, you are an author with a couple books and a small Newsletter of 500 readers. You send a monthly email on the second Friday of each month but have just begun using SO and are not tech savvy. Everything about this confuses you, but you’d learn if someone showed you how.

 

Here I am. Teaching you how.

 

After creating your account, the first thing you need to do is create a landing page. This will be either a Universal Book Link (UBL) or a Reader Magnet. The Reader Magnet is a free book readers can download in exchange for signing up for your mailing list; this is often a sample, exclusive epi/pro logue, or a first in series. UBLs are links that sends someone to where the book is available for sale.

If you do not create a UBL or a Magnet you will not be able to find swap partners. I recommend adding every book in your backlist as a UBL and adding all your magnets before proceeding (Caution—you risk being kicked off amazon if you share a book for free as a magnet when the book is available in KU. It is a TOS violation to share more than 10% of the book, even in a free format, if it is enrolled in KU).

 

Secondly, once you have that made, you will want to add some dates to your calendar (go to Campaign Planner and click the blue Plan Upcoming Campaigns button). I’ll tell you why to do this now a little further in this guide, but you should absolutely do it now and not later or else you’ll hit road blocks. If you send your NL Monthly, set up 3 months’ worth.  If it’s more frequently, you can set the frequency to whatever you like, but get at least 3 upcoming sends scheduled here. Be sure to add 5 tags so that swap partners can find you by searching for partners with similar genre books and add which books you are looking for swaps on if someone wants to partner with you for a swap (remember UBLs send to sale links and magnets are to give your book away in exchange for new subscribers).

 

You should now have some upcoming campaigns with dates attached under the upcoming campaigns tab. If you are intending to share a reader magnet to find new subscribers, then you ought to integrate your mailing list with your service provider if you haven’t done so yet. This is an additional paid feature for BookFunnel, even if you’ve paid for the regular package on BF (this is included with the paid plan at SO and is one of the primary 2 reasons I think it is superior—it automatically downloads new users onto your mailing list provider.) Be sure to click here for a tutorial on how to integrate if you haven’t done so yet. I’m sure you already know all about onboarding new users and using email automation to welcome new subscribers. But in case that’s new to you, then you need Newsletter Ninja. It’s probably the #1 resource I recommend to new authors I work with.

 

Third step: Click Group Promos Joined and then the big blue button to find a promotion. We’ll pretend we’re looking for a promo for a Christian title that is going to share the UBL, so select a tag in the filter box and also a type… to share a UBL, it would be “Sale.” (If you click subscribe you’ll get emailed updates when new promos meeting your filters are created.)

Clicking the Title of the Group Promo opens it in a different page. Here, you can either A. Preview the group promo which will show you what is currently accepted and what the title graphic looks like and/or B. sign up for the promotion. I always check the promo first. If the graphic is bad I usually pass because it will lead to lower clicks on behalf of all partners. If it’s got books with bad/DIY covers I will often decline to join as well since it indicates a lesser amount of quality control on behalf of the organizer. Not every applicant should get in. Good organizers know that quality is better than quantity.  I won’t talk about organizing here, but I mention it in other articles.

 

When you apply, you will have to fill out all the boxes. It’s simple, so long as you followed the instructions up till now. The proper options will be listed in your drop down menus after you select your author profile. Associate With Campaign Planner will let you select the date of an upcoming newsletter send and will help you track your data properly. You should always use it (unless you want to have bad data and look like a hack to your swap partners.)

After you click to apply, you will need to wait. The organizer will be notified via email that a new applicant has asked to join.  Be patient. It may be minutes; it could be days. You might also be ignored. That is the most likely case if you didn’t read that article I linked waaaaay in the beginning. It happens especially if your cover is subpar, you didn’t read the submission guidelines (called Instructions here,) or are in the wrong genre. The genre issue is big. I do SciFi promos and Fantasy promos and I get TONS of SFF romance with bare chests and exposed skin. That’s on point for erotica and romance. But not for SFF. It doesn’t matter for SF Romance. I don’t know how often I have to say it, but XYZ+Romance does not mean your book should be in the XYZ category. It only fits in XYZ Romance or in Romance, but not in XYZ. It happens often but that doesn’t make it right. The cross over simply is not there and it demonstrates that the applicant author has not done his or her homework concerning genre and simply wants all the exposure he or she can get. Target better and get better results.

A Group Promo is different from a Newsletter swap in that the group all lists their books together on one landing page which randomizes the order of the books. All participants share the main graphic and send links to the page so that all of the contributing authors’ readers see it. Ideally, they all click through and then are exposed to all other participants’ books. With a Swap, you and the other author swap mentions/promotion opportunities for a single book. It is more targeted and you can add a little more detail, such as a single line hook or a short blurb.

Doing a swap follows almost the exact same procedure as getting into a group promo. The only difference is that you don’t have a group promo Preview option. You will instead be given links to info and landing pages for potential book swaps. Admiral Ackbar Warning (it’s a trap!) Don’t just look for the biggest numbers to swap with. Yes they are important, but large lists aren’t everything.

It is important to click through and do 30 seconds worth of research before clicking to swap. On the graphic I’ll show you why. On Item #3 you see the info page after I click on a “Fantasy” tagged list that is 24,000 subs strong with a +26% open rate and an 18% click rate. That’s the golden ticket! But all is not as it seems. Numbers can be fudged/misreported. This author is a total hack, when you look at the numbers. (I’ve hidden their identity so this person’s mother won’t suffer eternal embarrassment).

The process from here is the same: wait until you’ve been accepted or ignored. 

 

Back to the Campaign Planner. This will show you your next upcoming NL sends with all the data you’ll need to fulfill your side of a NL Swap. It will show you how many groups you are accepted into and how many swaps you have agreed to. The Home screen on your Author Dashboard will also show you most of this, but from the Campaign Planner menu you can see more than just the next campaign and can see all your upcoming campaigns which lets you plan ahead (for say a bigger push with an upcoming launch, etc.)

Click on the link indicating your Send Date on your upcoming campaigns to see more than generic details like how many swaps and groups you are committed to sharing in your upcoming newsletter to be sent on that date.

 

Under Links for me to Promote you can see my send obligations for an upcoming campaign. I am sending 4x book mentions (1 magnet and 3x UBLs—magnets don’t have affiliate link options) and 2x groups.

This is the most important! This is your tracking link. When you share this swap, you MUST use this link and no other. Do not share the direct link. Do not share a different affiliate link. Don’t share anything else but this link—if you do, no clicks will be recorded! Your stats will read 0, zero, nothing, and you’ll look like a deadbeat hack.You MAY use this link more than once. You can share this link on social media, for example, and those clicks WILL count towards your share count. You can use this link in your NL, facebook, insta, twitter, parler, pornhub, wherever you share links and you’ll get credit if someone clicks on it.This is a quick link back to the book cover you are sharing. Always use a graphic rather than a text link.This is a quick, direct link to the banner image if this is a group promo. Your required graphics are in the same location despite the type.If you have an affiliate link for UBLs you may insert it with the blue buttons, but it is not necessary (I earn about ten-twenty bucks a month off affiliate commission, you can search out links on affiliates on my blog if you’re interested.)

if you scroll further down you will see Authors promoting you.

This is your swap partner, click the envelope to email them directly for any reasonKeep in mind the date. If you see 0 clicks, make sure their send date has passed… you may have agreed to a swap and the author isn’t sending for weeks or months yet… you have to pay attention to those details when you make the initial swaps.Archive links send you to a copy of the newsletter your swap partner sent. Sometimes this is helpful to see, but not all authors will have it automatically attach. Mine used to, but something changed with my provider and now it does not. When others ask to see it, I get an archive link manually from my menu in Mailerlite and send it directly upon request. You may find the same.

Because newsletter/email service providers are all different, I won’t go into creating/sending those. Just make sure you send the correct link, using that tracking link (#1 in the image above.) The same goes for using bookfunnel which operates in a similar manner. If you don’t use your correct tracking link, your stats will go down the tube and your swap opportunities will dry up.

 

You may have noticed that there are many ways to click into a swap partner’s campaign stats and view their send history. It really is that important to people who rely on quality swaps to build their marketing plans around.  I repeat it again because it’s super important: If you don’t use the tracking link, it will not show that you’ve shared anything. When you go to request a swap with me or ask to be added to a group promo I’m running, this is what I see when I click on your NL’s stats.

See all of those zeros?  That means the swap was not fulfilled. Likewise for numbers that are 1 or 2 since they can be explained by the swap partner clicking to check a link, read data, or grab or graphic. (You also see in this screenshot that the list owner is “stuffing” his list and had 19x swap partners promote him in June… even if he had fulfilled his end of the swap [and we have no proof of that] anything more than a couple is far too many.)

If your email list is in the low numbers and you’re looking to get more subscribers without breaking all the rules, check out my article on how to build a list rapidly and with integrity.